Guys, can you stop speculating about when the story's gonna end? "Not yet", that's when! Also, luminous dot elcenia dot com: it is your new favorite website.

The way Cullens got onto airplanes was this: accepting pat-downs after they made the scanning machines go absolutely haywire, complaining vaguely of having "weird bioelectricity". When that didn't quite work, outright bribery in large denominations. And, apparently, flirting with the security officers. Esme made awfully compelling doe-eyes at one portly fellow, accompanied by a flutter of Italian. He stammered at her a little and waved her through, then looked hurt when she joined an indulgent Carlisle and kissed him.

I was much easier to get through security: Edward had found my passport in my room before leaving for Italy and the security equipment didn't so much as blink a light at my passage. And the plane rides, spent in first class and in Edward's arms, were much more pleasant than my other recent experiences with aircraft. Particularly since I was welcome to any food I wanted from what the Cullens received, and therefore had not one, but four miniature cheesecakes. There was, however, a tense moment when I described for him the tests Aro had undertaken of my witchcraft.

"He told Jane to try -" sputtered Edward, looking angrier than I'd ever seen him except when he'd been roaring at James.

"It didn't work," I hurried to say. "Nothing happened. She looked really upset about it. Why, what does she do?"

Edward's teeth were clenched so tightly I thought he might split a molar. Carlisle explained for him. "Jane's talent is a sadistic one," he said in a soft voice that carried to my seat and no farther. "She can cause pain. A purely mental pain, but a disabling one. She is limited to one subject at a time, and is restricted to victims in her line of sight, but she's feared nonetheless. You are very lucky to have proven immune."

"Oh," I breathed. Lucky indeed. I loved my witchy talent very much. "Uh, and the boy who looks like her - I didn't get his name? He doesn't work on me either," I said.

"Alec," said Edward, finally relaxing his jaw enough to talk. "He is Jane's biological twin. And his power is the opposite of hers in many ways. He's anaesthetic where she is torture - he turns off all senses, even proprioception. He can affect several at a time and doesn't need to look at all of his targets, but his power moves slowly."

That was consistent with what I'd seen. "James fell over when Alec looked at him," I remembered. "I guess it's hard to stand up if you can't feel where your legs are." Edward nodded with a sort of grim satisfaction.

"What does "la tua cantante" mean?" I asked him, changing the subject from what grotesque powers I was protected from.

"It means "your singer"," Edward said. "That's what the Volturi call someone who smells the way you do to me - they think of it as your blood singing for me."

"That's kind of gross," I remarked.

"A little," laughed Edward. "They think it's a waste that I haven't eaten you. They consider singers the ultimate delicacy. And Aro said he'd never have believed there was a singer so powerful if he hadn't smelled you in my memories."

"He read you." My stomach turned a little. I didn't like the idea of Aro spying on Edward... or me, through Edward's eyes. I'd been careful not to drop hints of my plans for world domination, but I wasn't too pleased with the notion that Aro now had a full complement of memories of Edward kissing me, Edward leaving me gifts, Edward carrying me through the woods, Edward guarding me for days at a stretch. I hadn't liked Aro before; now I liked him less.

Edward nodded, looking somber but not nauseated. "It's his standard means of communication for anything complicated. Marcus rarely speaks at all, preferring to simply transmit to Aro and let him do the talking."

"I'm glad my mind is safe," I murmured. "I wish yours were."

Edward kissed the crown of my head. "I'll admit it chafes at me a bit that I can't read you," he said. "But I'm glad you prefer it that way, since it doesn't seem there's any way around it."

"It's good there's no way around it," I said. "If there were, then Aro could decide to coerce me into dropping the shield. Since I can't drop the shield, he knows there's no point in threatening me or anything - it won't do any good. It's to my advantage not to be able to turn it off. Even if I wanted to let you in, just having that ability would be bad."

Edward looked thoughtful. The conversation lulled, and then turned to other subjects: the Denali coven and speculations about how they would get on with David; whether Laurent was still with them and how, if at all, the news of his coven-mates' destruction could be broken; James's knowledge of Alice's origins, and the development of a plan to send her to the region where she'd woken, to search for herself in asylum records. (I didn't like to think of Alice locked up in a psychiatric hospital, especially not in the early nineteen hundreds. She was so bubbly, and seemed to take so much joy in things, that it seemed unreasonably cruel. And, on top of that, her visions were true - or, at least, were in her vampire life. I supposed they could have been hallucinatory when she was human.)

After entirely too much travel, I arrived back home in Forks, alone in a car with Carlisle. Esme and Edward had gotten out and were running home to prop up my preposterous story, although Edward had promised to come by and see me soon.

When I got in the door of my house, it was almost ten p.m. (Friday) local time, and I was even about the right amount of tired. Charlie was waiting up for me, and engulfed me in a tremendous hug when I lurched through the door. "Bells, you're home! I missed you."

"I missed you, too, Dad," I said with a watery sort of smile.

"I called your mother," Charlie went on, and I winced; "she's expecting you to get on the phone with her tomorrow, but I convinced her to leave you be tonight."

"Thanks, Dad."

Why didn't Dr. Cullen warn us that you'd sleepwalk ahead of time?" he asked, looking over my head at Carlisle, who was sitting in his car in the driveway. Carlisle waved, smiled, and drove off, having confirmed that I was safely home.

"Uh, it's a really rare symptom," I said. "I guess he didn't think it was worth worrying us about."

"Hmph," Charlie said. "Well, I'm glad you're better. You've looked under the weather for weeks."

I hadn't thought Charlie had noticed - Rosalie's drug schedule, and the fortunately-complete-before-I-was-kidnapped egg extraction surgery, had left me a little less than my best, but no one had commented. Well, Edward had commented, mostly to see if there was anything he could do for me, but he knew what was going on - no humans had said anything about it.

"I feel fine now," I assured him. "Just kind of tired - lots of travel."

Charlie nodded, patted me on the head, and released me from the hug. "Get a good night's sleep, Bells," he instructed, and I nodded.

When I got up to my room, Edward was already there.

"Your father would have turned me away if I'd gone by the door," Edward explained. "But I did say I'd drop by."

"Soon, you said, not immediately," I laughed softly, not wanting to alert Charlie to the fact that I was having a conversation.

"Immediately is soon," he countered, pulling me into another hug. He smelled so nice. All of the vampires did, although there were variations - Esme reminded me of vanilla, for instance. I leaned on him sleepily and inhaled.

"I'm tired," I announced.

"All right," he said, kissing my forehead. "I'll leave you be to rest; James isn't after you anymore, thankfully, so you don't need constant supervision."

"You could stay anyway," I suggested, half conscious, and then Edward tucked me into bed and I was out like a light.

I woke up still in the clothes Gianna had given me. Edward was lying next to me, on top of the covers that I was tucked under; I could feel his arm around me. Through the blanket, I could barely tell that he was cold.

"Morning," I yawned, burrowing my head a little deeper into the pillow. It was Saturday, nobody was trying to kill me, and I could lounge in bed all day if I wanted to.

Interestingly, my exciting week didn't prevent life from going back to normal. Or rather, what had become normal in recent months. After Emmett and Jasper went on a road trip to truck David up to Denali, I was able to resume my visits to the Cullen house. Alice decided that she needed to plan my wedding - "after all," she explained, "even if you decide not to actually get married when you tell everyone you are, you'll have to send home convincing photos, so that means decorations and cake and clothes!" She had a point, and I turned over the responsibility over to her after securing veto power over anything I found absolutely tasteless.

Gianna took ten days to reply to my first e-mail, which I sent the Monday after my return. It had been a brief thing - "I'm home safe, how are you, thanks again for the clothes, what's up in Volterra". I was fishing for tidbits with which to start some more substantial exchange, and from there I hoped to segue into asking the questions that really itched at me.

Dear Bella, her reply began. Apparently she was in the habit of treating e-mails like letters.

I'm glad you got home okay, and I hope everything continues to go smoothly for you. I'm doing fine. Today I finally found out why Santiago goes by a man's name - it's not her name at all, it's the city she's from. She didn't tell me her real name, though, and I try not to ask too many questions in a row, because it makes them suspicious. Maybe I'll find out the next time I talk to her. But she seems to prefer to go by "Santiago", so I'm not sure how useful that would be. I have heard that Carlisle, from your coven, lived with the Volturi long ago. Perhaps he knows. Sincerely, Gianna"

This read to me like either an out-of-place bit of dwelling on Santiago's name - I hadn't even known it wasn't a girls' name - or a subtle direction to go to Carlisle, not Gianna, for info on the Volturi. That was all well as far as it went. (And it might also mean they were reading her mail.) But Carlisle had lived in Volterra before Gianna had even been born, and it was her I was most interested in learning about.

Dear Gianna, I wrote a few days later, following the convention she preferred. I asked Carlisle and he says Santiago is a more recent addition to the guard, so he doesn't know her name. During the entire time he was there, in fact, no one new arrived. So he only knows a few things about how they normally bring in new people. Apparently they go out of their way to add witches, or rather vampires with extra talents, but not everyone in the guard has one. How do people without extra talents get admitted to the guard? Sincerely, Bella

We went back and forth at a snail's pace - short, oblique e-mails every week or two. It was frustrating. I eventually gave up on figuring out the details of how Gianna had come to work for the Volturi or whether she expected to join them one day. I settled for newsy personal exchanges. We both stuck to innocuous information that her bosses wouldn't care about: I never told her if Jasper came close to slipping up in public or anything about Quileutes. Gianna would mention if she traveled internationally, but never specified city and only sometimes told me the country. She often told me in glowing terms about her favorite restaurants in Volterra, which was the very safest of topics and was frequently mouthwatering to read.

Edward offered me once to tell me what he'd read off Gianna's mind when he'd been nearby. I asked how much he'd listened to, and it wasn't much - enough to answer a fraction of my questions but not all of them. He hadn't heard enough to know whether Gianna had a good reason to be cagey, and that was the part that made me refuse. I had no idea how often Aro read her, or how little it would take to turn her into a snack. If the Volturi were reading the correspondence, and I accidentally hinted something I'd learned from Edward, they could think she'd spilled the beans some other way. Refusing information was hard, but it was the sort of thing I'd need to be able to do if I was going to spend any time with Edward.

The school year plodded on. Despite my weeklong absence and increasing restlessness about the unstimulating work, I went on pulling good grades. I was able to contain the story about my departure via pickup truck - among my classmates and teachers the blanket explanation for the entire five days was "Bella was sick".

Edward and I continued brandishing our relationship at anyone who wandered past. If anything, we had gotten more over-the-top. I started talking about rings - in the abstract - with Jessica, and by the following afternoon, the rumor was that Edward had already proposed.

He hadn't. In fact, ostentatious couplehood aside, nothing had changed except that Edward had started staying overnight most days - lying awake next to me and listening to me (apparently) talk in my sleep. I made him tell me what I'd said, every morning after the one on which he informed me I'd been mumbling. It was usually names, Cullens and family members and classmates. Sometimes it was incomprehensible fragments like "don't the cake" or "prawns, where the rainbow is".

When his nighttime visits had been the only change by the end of April, I was pretty sure he was disobeying Alice: he wasn't going slow, because he wasn't going at all.

We had been dating for months and he still hadn't told me he loved me.

I knew perfectly well that he did. That was the thing - I'd have been in a far different sort of situation if Edward hadn't fallen for me.

I'd been informed that the Denali sisters brought random human men into their beds all the time (previously to eat them in the style of the praying mantis, lately just to have fun and send them home alive, albeit bruised). They didn't rearrange their lives around those men, because they didn't love them. But when Laurent had shown up, he and one of the sisters, Irina, had been magnetically drawn to each other, and then no more soft and warm boys for her - a rather significant lifestyle change for one of the inspirations of succubus myth. If I'd just looked like a good time, while also being Edward's "singer", he'd have left town. It wouldn't have been worth the risk of my exsanguination (and the ensuing investigation into my death).

And even if that hadn't been the case, Edward was really obvious. The way he looked at me just screamed that he loved me. The way he touched me, the presents, the way he zipped about making sure that everything I wanted was in place whenever I expressed preferences - everything. It was the plainly missing piece every time he spoke to me.

And he wouldn't say it.

The traditional way to elicit a profession of love was to offer one oneself. I was sure that would get him to reply in kind. But I wasn't sure it was true. I suspected it... but didn't know how to be sure.

I was tempted to just wait another month, get turned, and then have a magical guarantee that I wouldn't be lying. But it didn't just bother me that it had gone unsaid - it bothered me that there was something this significant that I didn't know about myself.

I didn't want to be witnessed at this particular exercise, so I found a thick quilt to cover me and the laptop. I picked a Tuesday afternoon when Jessica had canceled our study plans, and so Edward didn't expect to monopolize me. I ensconced myself in my room and typed.

I put my thoughts right after the long, thorough diary entry I'd made about the days I'd spent in James's control. (Unpleasant as it had been, I didn't want to forget about it entirely when my human memories were occluded by newer, sharper vampire ones: therefore it had to be written down, where I could read it later and retrieve everything about the description with perfect fidelity.)

Thinking about whether I loved Edward was unfamiliar and difficult. It was like I was wading through mud. Laboriously, I typed. I certainly at least liked Edward. I enjoyed his company - he went to considerable lengths to make sure that I would - and I was attracted to him. I didn't know how that added up to love, if it did, or if there was something else that was supposed to be involved. Was there anyone I could ask?

The vampires were all out. They were all cases of love at first sight or close to it (beforehand, for Alice), which I definitely hadn't experienced. Their recognition of the state wasn't likely to be informative to me. I didn't really want to have a conversation with either of my parents that would throw my planned elopement into doubt, and their marriage had ended in divorce anyway (although things seemed to be working out for Renée and Phil so far).

I wondered if any of my human friends from school would be useful. Jessica and Mike were still together, but they had a fractious and not particularly intellectual relationship. Being Jessica's boyfriend meant being Jessica's status symbol and her designated source of makeouts and free dinners, and not much else. Angela had eventually gotten together with the object of her affections, a boy named Ben. Their relationship seemed more like mine than Jessica and Mike's. Angela and Ben were content together, and did small things to make each other happy, and seemed secure in their mutual affection.

The "secure" bit seemed important. That was possibly the thing I liked most about Edward - he was safe in the way no one else ever could be. He couldn't get sick of me. He couldn't cheat. He couldn't hurt me - well, accidents were possible, but only accidents. He couldn't even want to do any of those things. He'd protect me with his life, if that was what it took; he was resisting temptation I couldn't even comprehend in order to be near me, and he did it perfectly every time.

Being with Edward was peculiar in many ways, simply because he was a vampire, but in a sense, it was uncomplicated.

After I'd gotten this far I started feeling vaguely uncomfortable about picking the subject apart by myself. It seemed like it might be Edward's business, how I felt about him, and it was uncommonly challenging to plow through this mess - someone to talk to might help.

I poked at my keyboard for a few minutes more, disconsolate about my inability to sort things out myself. I wished I'd dated more - well, at all - in Phoenix, so I could say, "Oh, this is different, these feelings are stronger/dissimilar, they're more intrusive/altruistic/abstract/frequent/full of sex/whatever, aha, perhaps I am now in love." No such luck. I'd spent my time single. I'd focused on the more diverting schoolwork offered by AP classes, the endless rotation of Renée's new obsessions, and books. Even the romance novels were unhelpful: the characters didn't act like any real human beings I'd met at all, and if I wasn't prone to comparable dramatic exhalations about my uncontrollable ardor, it didn't mean anything except that I wasn't meant to be watercolored on the cover of a mass market paperback containing borderline porn.

The prospect of talking to Edward about whether I was in love with him or not sounded extremely awkward. It would probably hurt him, I'd probably trip over my tongue a lot, and it might not even lead me to a definite conclusion. I could just put it off, just a bit longer.

But Edward was, above all things, safe to talk to. That wasn't true of anyone else, and I wasn't getting very far on my own -

And I wanted to hear him say it.

I did my homework, reassessed my intentions for another minute, and then called Edward. He agreed to come over as soon as I told him Jessica had canceled and asked if he'd like to. Minutes later, he was at the door, buttering up Charlie with gentlemanly formality and then slipping upstairs to me.

As soon as he crossed into my room, his arms were around me and his lips planted on my forehead. "Hello, Bella," he said, drawing his face back an inch to look me in the eye.

"Hi, Edward," I said, simultaneously soothed to see him and anxious about having the conversation I was about to prompt.

He noticed, of course. "Bella, what's wrong?" He pulled me to sit next to him on my bed, one arm around me and the other holding my hand.

I dropped my head onto his shoulder. I decided to start with him instead of myself, my motivations somewhere between wanting to work up to it and wanting to simply put it off. "Do you love me?" I asked.

"Yes," he said at once, in a low murmur.

"You never say it."

"I didn't want to push you," Edward sighed. "You'll let me hold you, you'll let me spend more time with you than I would have dared to ask for - I don't want to do anything that would jeopardize that. It's already so much more than I deserve."

I picked my head up and stared at him. He met my gaze calmly. Did he really think that? That I was "letting" him be near me? That my permission was a fragile thing he had to tiptoe around? How could he think that?

"Edward, I love you," I said, and I knew as I said it that it was true.

There was a silent moment, and then Edward was kissing me, and I had just enough time to think oh, I guess we can do that after all before my brain shut up and let me enjoy myself.